Roger’s note: Obama is going to visit Hiroshima. He will be accompanied by a military aide carrying a metal briefcase, covered in black leather, known as the “nuclear football”. Inside are the codes US presidents need to authorize a nuclear strike when they are away from established command centres such as the White House.

Although many nations possess nuclear weapons, the United States is the only one to have ever used one in war. Many historians contradict the official justification for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two population centers of no military strategic importance, to save lives by ending the war without a costly invasion of Japan. General Eisenhower for one opposed the use of the A-Bomb, which killed an estimated 200,000 civilians: “I voiced … my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’.”

Those historians allege the real reason was to demonstrate the weapon to the Soviet Union; as such it was in effect the first shot fired in the Cold War.

According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, there are 15,350 nuclear warheads on the earth today

Russia and the United States each possess around 7,000. Other nations in this deadly club include the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Iran, by the way, has none.

The brilliant Russian playwright, Anton,Chekhov famously opined that if a gun appeared in the first act, it was destined to go off in the third. It seems to me that we are dangerously close to that third act.